Art Davie, the 79-year-old founder of the UFC, has revealed intimate details about rooming with a teenage Donald Trump at military school, describing the future president as an “egomaniac” even at 16 who “wanted everyone to recognize he was the GOAT in everything he did out there.”
In a bombshell interview published June 10, 2026, Davie pulled back the curtain on his time as President Donald Trump’s bunkmate at the New York Military Academy in 1962, when the two shared a small two-cadet room in Company E at the private boarding school in Cornwall, New York, an hour’s drive north of New York City.
The revelations come as Trump celebrated his 80th birthday on Sunday, June 14, with an Ultimate Fighting Championship event on the South Lawn of the White House — staged inside the very octagonal chain-link cage that Davie himself devised decades ago.
An Egomaniac at 16
Trump, then a 16-year-old supply sergeant from Queens in his third year at the academy, arrived first to their shared room in September 1962 and claimed the bottom bunk. Davie, a 15-year-old private from Brooklyn starting his first year, took the top bunk. The room doubled as storage for M1 rifles — minus their firing pins — used by cadets for drills and ceremonies.
Even then, Davie said, Trump nursed grievances that would become familiar to American voters more than half a century later. “He was an egomaniac when he was 16,” Davie told the publication. “He was a great flag waver for himself. He wanted everyone to recognize he was the GOAT in everything he did out there.”
Davie recalled one argument over soccer, a sport at which Trump was not particularly good. Two fellow cadets from South America held that distinction on campus. Trump, however, was one of the school’s best baseball players.
“I remember Trump and I getting in an argument about the fact that he’s the GOAT when it came to soccer,” Davie said. “I said, ‘No, in baseball, you could say you’re the GOAT.'”
Trump pivoted to a bigger complaint: he believed he should have been promoted to captain rather than serving as supply sergeant. He was also enormously impressed by President John F. Kennedy, particularly with how the media amplified Kennedy’s star quality without Kennedy having to boast about it himself.
The Inspection Day Blowup
The roommates had what Davie described as a good relationship until one inspection day when U.S. Army officers — a lieutenant colonel and a lieutenant — checked the cadets’ quarters. A pass meant every cadet could wear a small silver star on the right sleeve. Trump took the visit with stiff formality, while Davie chatted casually with the lieutenant colonel, even joking that the M1 rifles were “only pop guns” without their firing pins.
Trump was furious, accusing Davie of talking to the officers like they were on the streets of Brooklyn. It was the only serious argument the two ever had. When school resumed after the Christmas holiday, the pair had been reassigned to different rooms. Davie was sent to Section 9 behind the main barracks, where he said cadets were given single-bedroom rooms. He has long wondered whether Trump had a hand in the move.
Vietnam and ‘Cadet Bonespurs’
Davie finished out the year and completed high school in Manhattan. He later enlisted in the Marine Corps and served 11 months and nine days in Vietnam, returning home an actual sergeant before attending St. John’s University.
Trump stayed at the academy and made captain by the time he graduated in 1964. He went on to secure five draft deferments. The last was a permanent medical deferment from a Queens podiatrist who rented an office in a building owned by Trump’s father, Fred Trump. The doctor diagnosed bone spurs. In 2018, the podiatrist’s daughters said their late father had provided the diagnosis as a “favor” to the elder Trump. Among academy alumni, the story earned the future president a lasting nickname: “Cadet Bonespurs.”
From Military School to the South Lawn
Davie created and co-produced the UFC in 1993, devising the now-iconic octagonal chain-link cage. That same cage design sat on the South Lawn for “UFC Freedom 250” on June 14, ringed by a red, white and blue stage under a towering star-and-stripe arch with two large screens. Trump has said the finished project will feature “a 5,000-seat arena right outside the front door of the White House,” with up to 85,000 free tickets distributed between the South Lawn and the nearby Ellipse, where additional large screens will broadcast the fights.
The event coincided with the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The Public Integrity Project has filed a lawsuit on behalf of two Virginia residents hoping to halt the fight card, though preparations continued. For Davie, watching his old bunkmate stage the spectacle on the most famous lawn in America is the latest twist in a friendship — and rivalry — that began with a top bunk, a bottom bunk and an argument about who was the GOAT.
